Long before generative artificial intelligence entered everyday life, digital animation had already become one of the primary cultural laboratories in which spectators learned to cinesthetically inhabit synthetic worlds. Drawing on Vivian Sobchack’s phenomenology of film, Christiane Voss’s cinesthetic spectatorship, and concepts of immersion and extension from video games and sculpture, [The author] synthesizes these concepts to explain how 3D feature animation entangles viewers with non-indexical environments and characters. Through close analysis of media from Pixar, Dreamworks and other studios, the paper demonstrates how selectively augmented textural details invite viewers to mentally simulate objects and environments which, although lacking physical referents, nevertheless feel experientially tangible. This psychophysical entanglement collapses the border between viewer and viewed in a synthetic context. The paper then explores the critical and audience reception of non-indexical media, showing that viewers consistently describe unreal environments using tactile and embodied language. These responses suggest that animation has long been preparing audiences to engage with synthetic environments and agents, functioning as an embodied prosthesis within Katherine Hayles’s posthuman framework of distributed cognition. Rather than treating artificial intelligence as a sudden technological rupture, this paper positions digital animation as the historical bridge through which audiences first learned to feel, perceive, and inhabit synthetic worlds. In doing so, it argues that the boundary between human and technological intelligence is negotiated not only through computation, but through embodied aesthetic experience.

Authors:
Nathan Snow, Utah Tech University, United States

About the Presenter(s)
Dr. Nathan Snow is an Associate Professor of Digital Media at Utah Tech University. His research explores cinesthetics, embodiment, and synthetic media, examining how animation, games, and emerging technologies shape human perception.

Connect on Linkedin
https://www.linkedin.com/in/nathanssnow/

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